Lydia nodded.
"I'll try it. Is it too far to walk?" she asked.
"Much too far," said Jean. "Mordon will drive you out. He knows the road very well and you ought not to take anybody but an experienced driver. I have a permis for the car to pass the frontier; you will probably meet father in San Remo—he is taking a motor-cycle trip, aren't you, daddy?"
Mr. Briggerland drew a long breath and nodded. He was beginning to understand.
Chapter XXXIV
There was lying in Monaco harbour a long white boat with a stumpy mast, which delighted in the name of Jungle Queen. It was the property of an impecunious English nobleman who made a respectable income from letting the vessel on hire.
Mrs. Cole-Mortimer had seemed surprised at the reasonable fee demanded for two months' use until she had seen the boat the day after her arrival at Cap Martin.
She had pictured a large and commodious yacht; she found a reasonably sized motor-launch with a whale-deck cabin. The description in the agent's catalogue that the Jungle Queen would "sleep four" was probably based on the experience of a party of young roisterers who had once hired the vessel. Supposing that the "four" were reasonably drunk or heavily drugged, it was possible for them to sleep on board the Jungle Queen. Normally two persons would have found it difficult, though by lying diagonally across the "cabin" one small-sized man could have slumbered without discomfort.
The Jungle Queen had been a disappointment to Jean also. Her busy brain had conceived an excellent way of solving her principal problem, but a glance at the Jungle Queen told her that the money she had spent on hiring the launch—and it was little better—was wasted. She herself hated the sea and had so little faith in the utility of the boat, that she had even dismissed the youth who attended to its well-worn engines.